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By Michael Hall, Managing
Editor
An otherwise typical set of release notes for the latest version
of GNU libc ended in an angry broadside against Richard Stallman,
accusing the Free Software Foundation’s President of trying to
stage a “hostile takeover” of the project’s development.
According to Ulrich Drepper, a Red Hat developer and the GNU
libc maintainer, Stallman’s efforts to control the project failed
after
a steering committee designed to handle policy and planning
issues “acknowledged the status quo” on the project.
Drepper maintains that the steering committee was created after
he threatened to fork the project or resign:
“When this SC idea came up I wanted to fork glibc (out
of Stallman’s control) or resign from any work. The former was not
welcome this it was feared to cause fragmentation. I didn’t agree
but if nobody would use a fork it’s of no use. There also wasn’t
much interest in me resigning so we ended up with the SC
arrangement where the SC does nothing except the things I am not
doing myself at all: handling political issues. All technical
discussions happens as before on the mailing list of the core
developers and I reserve the right of the final
decision.”
Drepper’s issues with Stallman extend along several lines,
including the license under which GNU libc was placed (Drepper
maintains that the project was licensed under the Lesser General
Public License 2.1 against his wishes), and a more general
complaint regarding long-standing issues of credit and
nomenclature, including Stallman’s tradition of referring to the
“GNU operating system, as well as its variant, the GNU/Linux
operating system.”
“This $&%$& demands everything to be labeled in
a way which credits him and he does not stop before making
completely wrong statements like “its variant”. I find this
completely unacceptable and can assure everybody that I consider
none of the code I contributed to glibc (which is quite a lot) to
be as part of the GNU project and so a major part of what Stallman
claims credit for is simply going away.”
Stallman has been contacted for comment.
The
entire message is available at LinuxProgramming.com.